For a young Mississippi soldier on furlough, the sign in a Kansas City shop window was tantalizing.
Who could resist cracking the door ever so slightly, peering inside this strange world that beckoned? He was planning to re-enlist, but it wouldn’t hurt to see if the sign’s prescient promise held merit.
“Your future is in upholstery,” the poster in the window boldly asserted, and for Willie Hood, that proved to be true. Five words led to 33 years in a profession he still loves today, and his little red, white and blue building has become a cornerstone of Waterworks Road.
Hood, 57, knows he is a lucky man. Hard work and loyal customers have kept food on his table for years. But in the early 1970s, he was just a young man on the brink of adulthood, trying to decide what he was going to do with his life.
Tuesday afternoon, while vacationing with family in Detroit, he reminisced via telephone about war, peace and the peace of mind that comes from following your heart.
Germany to Kansas
Hood was born in Macon, raised in Columbus, but when he graduated from Lee High School, horizons far more distant than Mississippi beckoned. He wanted to see the world, and though the Vietnam War had not yet ended, joining the United States Army seemed the best way.
He was initially assigned to the 1st Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One. Big Red’s soldiers were among the Army’s first to fight in Vietnam, but when the division returned to Fort Riley, Kansas in 1970, it became a dual-based division with the 3rd Brigade in West Germany.
Hood joined the unit in 1972, traveling back and forth between Kansas and Munich, working on REFORGER exercises, annual training designed to ensure NATO nations would be able to quickly deploy forces to West Germany if necessary.
During his furloughs, Hood fulfilled his dream of seeing the world. He visited Amsterdam, Turkey, Iceland, Italy. He spent as much time as he could at the Army’s installation in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, a resort town in the Bavarian Alps on the German-Austrian border.
There, he fell in love with snow skiing and the beauty of the snow-capped mountains. He also came face to face with history.
It was incongruous, he thought, that such a beautiful place could also be home to Dachau concentration camp, where the Nazis held more than 206,000 prisoners and killed nearly 32,000 between 1933 and 1945.
“It looked like everything was still so normal,” he says of the surreal ski resort setting of Dachau and “The Eagle’s Nest” — Hitler’s retreat. “It was a real cold place. It just looked like it wasn’t real. It was so isolated. It gave you a funny feeling.”
When Hood was transferred to the 26th Infantry Regiment, called the Blue Spaders because of the regiment’s distinctive insignia, he was sent to warmer climes, working to train recruits in Iraq and other countries.
By 1977, he had copious amounts of furlough, so he traveled often. It was on one of these trips that he saw the sign in Kansas that would change his life.
‘A real good trade’
Hood walked inside the upholstery school and stared in wonder at the room filled with students, their fingers flying as they worked at whirring sewing machines. The instructor of the school invited him to tour the entire facility, and what he saw impressed him.
The room was so inviting and warm, and the work looked so interesting. He had seen Vietnam veterans who left the war with missing limbs and other injuries, and though he was able-bodied, it made him cognizant of life for the disabled and elderly.
“I said to myself, ‘I could do that even if I was in a wheelchair, even when I got old,'” Hood says. “It was something, if you ever learned it, ain’t nobody could take it away from you.”
For the next two years, he went back and forth between Army assignments and the upholstery school, where he earned an associate’s degree. With diploma in hand, Hood returned to Columbus, and in 1981, he opened his first shop, Hood Upholstery, Trim, and Cover Shop, on 20th Street.
The first five years were hard, so hard that he finally turned to another local businessman — Sidney Graham of Graham’s Fabrics on Tuscaloosa Road — and asked for advice on how to earn a living and develop a successful company.
“He said ‘Your business is a service business, and all you have to do is fix you up some flyers and take them around to all the businesses that desire your type of service,'” Hood says. “So that’s what I did. In less than a month, my business was flowing. And word of mouth has carried me further than I ever could have gone alone.”
The main draw is the versatility of the upholstery industry, Hood says. It’s challenging, and it gives him the chance to be creative. He likes restoration as much as he likes adding his own flair to a piece. He enjoys it so much, he taught his mother, two brothers, two sons and two nephews.
Still, he thinks five years from now, he will retire. Pass the shop to a successor and move to Atlanta to be closer to family.
But that doesn’t stop him from giving advice to up-and-coming youth and would-be entrepreneurs.
“Make sure when you get ready to go into a business you’re really sure it’s what you want to do,” Hood says. “I like all the aspects of my business. I like the whole total concept. I been doing it so long, ain’t nothin’ I take in I can’t do, and if I can’t, I tell ’em right off. It’s been a real good trade to be in.”
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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